Open Books

This book moved me to tears. Mrs. Vanderveen is a very talented writer. She explores the many emotions a grieving parent goes through- even the ones most people are afraid to acknowledge. I love her honesty and openess.It will help others feel not so alone with the emotions they will be going through...such as spirituality & sex. Her children are very lucky to have such a wonderful Mother who has left them a treasure of herself and their brother.

This book is great. It has a lot of information that is not in other books that I have read. It has contacts to all of the record pools (so you won't have to pay a DJ to play it) all of the music conference places and he explains what one is. He also give you some VALUABLE information that 98% of people trying to break into the industry don't know about talent shows and open mics. If you are serious about your career, buy this book because it is very helpful. It is a short book, I must admit, but it does have some good infomation.

This book lends many ideas for journaling. From "My Most Precious Possession" to "People Who Give Me Hope." It is in a "guided" journal format, and is very easy to use. The soft-bound cover makes for convenient use. Excellent source for those who wish to record their precious time on this earth.

In the tradition of the poet maudit, this collection of short stories mercilessly analyzes the extremes of modern life -- murder, suicide, marriage, sexual obsession, compulsive behavior, and psychological breakdown. Each individual piece is richly illustrated by Sue Coe. It has the engaging simplicity of a child telling a story, the imagination never ends.

Read with slow intent, Nature's Open Secret leads the reader into the world with the sincere reverence of a poet's gaze. What is openned up to the reader is the living ideas, the source of one's joy in the beauty, behind what the senses tell one of nature. One can begin to approach plants, animals and other phenomena of nature personally, with the entire self, rather than by the detatched way of a disective thinking.

I was contemplating suicide before reading this book but it has changed my life. Thank you, Stephen. Your words have uplifted my soul. Two words: AWESOME.

Each 128 pp edition of "Paintings" catalogs, in full color, work of the 50 winners of a rigorous competition for mid-career and emerging painters held in one of six regions of the US and juried by curators from major art museums (Guggenheim, National Gallery, etc.) museum-quality stock and reproduction; exciting new talent; almost no artspeak. Collectors and gallery directors report using these books as valuable resources for finding new talent. Great coffee table books for everyone!

Like potato chips, it's hard to be satisfied with with just one. This first, 1993, volume features artists from New England. Subsequent volumes feature artists from Mid-Atlantic, Southern, Midwestern, Western and Pacific Coast states; and then start again in the Northeast. Differences and similarities of artists around the country are fascinating to follow.

As of December, 1997, at least two competitions will have been held in each region of the country. For a list of volume numbers by region, e-mail your request to us.

Really liked this book. I have already flagged a number of tools I could use in my orientation program. The CDROM is helpful as well as the resource sheets and presentations are already made, so I can just tweak them for my purposes. Recommend to almost anyone looking to re-tool their orientation program.

Fascinating book. It's the most accessible and clear account of new literacies that I've read. The chapter "from Reading to New Literacy Studies" succinctly and clearly describes the social, economic, and educational factors that have influenced the evolution of the terms literacy and new literacies. The chapter "Faking It: The National Grid for Learning" is a useful example of what New Literacies (and good teaching) are not.

I would have liked some more connections to current work on epistemic cognition (ala books like Women's Ways of Knowing and Personal Epistemology)--there's a big opportunity to connect digital epistemology to this area of inquiry. But this 'suggestion' doesn't diminish my overall enthusiasm of the book (just add those books to your reading list if you are interested in the applications of epistemology in education).

Overall, this is an excellent book for any teacher or teacher educator who wants some guidance or food for though on using technology in literacy, humanities, or the social sciences--from Kindergarten to graduate school.

The New Testament and Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns by Stephen Cox (Open Court) acts as a guide, focusing on the underlying patterns that combine ideas with literary devices. The book identifies the literary formulas in the New Testament and shows how these elements have shaped English and American literature.
The New Testament may be the most influential book of all time, from both a religious and a literary standpoint. But while the New Testament's impact upon people's religious beliefs and practices has been analyzed-and continues to be analyzed-at enormous length and in intricate detail, amazingly little has been written about the New Testament's impact as literature.
In The New Testament and Literature, Stephen Cox offers a literary guide to the New Testament and to some of the classic works of Christian literature that have followed it. He identifies what he calls the New Testament's DNA, and shows how that DNA is replicated in works by such varied authors as John Donne, Rudyard Kipling, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Martin Luther King, and C.S. Lewis.
Professor Cox begins with fundamental questions of the origin and nature of the New Testament, identifies its literary genres, and shows how its basic literary patterns unite spe¬cific ideas with specific techniques. So pervasively influential has the New Testament been within English-speaking culture that even works by anti-Christian authors or writers whose orientation to Christianity is ambiguous persistently replicate the New Testament's literary patterns.
Cox's approach is not primarily theological, historical, or devotional. He does something uncommon, something often mentioned or recommended but rarely attempted in a serious way. It looks at the New Testament both as a distinctive work of literature and as a productive influence on later works of literature.
Many books have been written about "the Bible as literature." For some, the phrase means, in effect, the Old Testament as lit¬erature. For many others, it means the study of historical issues that have little to do with the special characteristics of New Testament writing. Few books are willing to assess the literary quality of the New Testament. Fewer still are written for intelli¬gent readers who may not already be very familiar with the Bible or Christian teachings.
Making the New Testament accessible as literature does not mean examining its techniques in abstraction from its vital mes¬sage. Nor does it mean tracing its themes in abstraction from its literary methods. The New Testament and Literature approaches its subject by identifying certain patterns, certain combinations of ideas and methods, that give the New Testament its distinc¬tiveness and coherence and its ability to create resemblances to itself in later literature. I call these patterns the DNA of the New Testament.
Part I (the first eight chapters) explores these patterns, iden¬tifying specific elements of the New Testament's DNA, and examining their effects on the four major types of New Testament literature: gospel, epistle, church history, and apoca¬lypse. The chief examples are the gospels of Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles of Paul to the Galatians and the Corinthians, and the Revelation.
Part II (Chapters 9-16), examines the influence of New Testament patterns on a wide range of English and American lit¬erature.
Chapter 9 shows the persistence of the New Testament DNA in one of the earliest works in the English language, The Dream of the Rood, and in a story written twelve centuries later, Rudyard Kipling's "The Gardener."
Chapter 10 samples the vast popular literature of Christian revival, with special reference to George Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a work of the Protestant Reformation, and Christian hymns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Chapter 11 discusses the importance of the New Testament DNA in the seemingly opposed religious movements repre¬sented by John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.
Chapter 12 explores the tradition of New Testament individ¬ualism, as represented especially in the work of William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
Chapter 13 takes up the influence of the book of Revelation, particularly in American culture. It looks at a variety of popular American writers, including Dickinson, Julia Ward Howe, James Baldwin, and Vachel Lindsay.
Chapter 14 analyzes literary challenges to Christianity, expos¬ing their ironic tendency to assimilate Christian patterns of thought and writing. This chapter considers works by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, D.H. Lawrence, Harold Frederic, Sinclair Lewis, and others.
Chapter 15 follows some of the many literary responses that Christians and non-Christians have made to attacks on Christianity and the New Testament. The authors considered here include Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Betjeman, Martin Luther King, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Browning.
Chapter 16 studies two distinguished examples of twentieth-century literature, the fiction of J.F. Powers and the poetry of T.S. Eliot-vivid illustrations of the way in which the same New Testament patterns can renew themselves in works that seem radically different in approach and style.
For the reader's convenience, Part III presents the texts of some of the works discussed in the book.